The Painted Lady

A brave attempt from D. W. Griffith to examine the psychological frailty of a plain girl who mistakenly believes she just might have found love. Blanche Sweet, as the older wallflower sister of the popular 'Painted Lady' of the title, handles a demanding role with skill and sensitivity, but Griffith struggles with the complexity of her character's disintegration, and would have been better off making a longer picture of the subject a few years later.

This is an incredible short by D.W. Griffith, featuring one of his most popular female actresses at the time, Blanche Sweet. Her portrayal of a young, repressed minister's daughter who goes insane after shooting a man she loved to protect her father's wealth, is outstanding and quite modern for the time. The camera doesn't give extreme closeups on this one, but Blanche's face is so expressive that they weren't needed and might actually have detracted from her performance. When someone goes insane we don't necessarily WANT to be too close up, but wish to maintain our distance from the descent, so that we aren't taken down too!

I recognized some later stars as well in bit parts, including Lillian and Dorothy Gish, Bobby Harron, and Harry Cary, and of course Kate Bruce is always effective in Griffith's short films, even in small roles like this one. Hers is really the last face we see in this poignant film as the camera fades.

I think the main strength here is Blanche Sweet's performance (if you've seen Death's Marathon it's the same actress, and she's fairly distinct at least in the eyes). Anything that's asked of her to do she performs it with a degree of subtlety that wasn't common during the silent period. If she does have to react BIG, it still is done for moments that are big emotional moments (there's a moment by the stairs that she's told something by, uh, her father I think, whoever it is with the beard), and yet I believe her in that moment as well as the others when she's acting with smaller physical gestures and something close to naturalism as possible.

The story is a little too scattered and the message is dated; this is a case where I actually wished for one or two (or three of more) title cards to show certain moments of dialog. The main core of the story is understood as that Sweet is a young woman who doesn't wear make-up (the story description here says her father forbids it, but I got the sense that she just doesn't like it, or doesn't conform). She goes out to some fair and she doesn't get as much attention as the other men.

But she does get into a conversation with one man and it appears he likes her for who she is... that is until it's revealed he's a burglar (what?) and breaks into her home. She doesn't know it's the same guy since he has a mask, she shoots him (sort of by accident), and when she discovers it she's sad. And then the rest of the movie is... her being even sadder. Was she traumatized by killing him? She then has fantasies of meeting someone who isn't there. And then at the end of the story she, uh, puts on make-up. Is it supposed to be a warning to women to put on make-up, to conform? Or is it a story where it's more personal, that this particular person didn't conform to societies standards of beauty and paid a personal price?

There's a hysterical undercurrent (and I mean that not in the funny way but in the old-time way that the word was used with women), and I'm not sure if this holds up very well. I was with the short at first as it was detailing a simple premise, and then it lost me a bit with the burglar component (I also didn't know her father was supposed to be a rich man or whatnot). Things like this make such a silent short dated despite the fact that Griffith's storytelling as director, as much as it's a mightily flawed story, is terrific and he has a great lead. It goes to show that even in 1912 if you haven't got a coherent story, you haven't got anything, all the technical prowess and fine acting besides.

I like the subhead to this film: "An Indictment Of Frivolous Femininity." I don't like the idea expressed in the story that a woman has to put on a lot of makeup to attract a man. In fact, in this case, the actress playing the "plain" and often-rejected girl, is pretty without it. She's Blanche Sweet, who starred in a ton of silent movies including many in her teenage years. Although only in her mid-teens when this was made (perhaps even 14), she looked more mature.

In this story, as we see, shyness and a too-strict father are also making a dating life almost nonexistent for poor, makeup-less "the older sister" (Sweet).

What happens in this story is very strange, and you can read various accounts of it here. I guess the lonely girl wasn't too good at figuring out men. Chalk it up to loneliness and inexperience. What happens in her house, though, is too weird and dates the movie quite a bit. But, that's to be expected. After all, the movie isn't far from being 100 years old.

It's nice that these old D.W. Griffith shorts are still available to the public, even if they look a little odd.

After a year or two of working with very small casts and perfecting his direction of actors, Griffith was by this point starting to work his way back towards the larger scale pictures, but still retaining the intimate, human focus. The Painted Lady demonstrates how he could make such an individual drama against the backdrop of crowds and moments of action.

This is a film about madness and isolation. Griffith demonstrates that isolation in a crowd shot early on. As opposed to the rather cluttered and confusing crowd scenes of Griffith's earliest works, the focus here is very clear. Blanche Sweet literally stands out from the crowd, a passive and solitary figure against a backdrop of much activity and excitement. Later, he repeatedly uses the very plain bridge location which forces us to focus totally upon her.

Although the Painted Lady does contain an action sequence of the kind that might normally be the climax of a Biograph short, Griffith instead makes it the catalyst for the final act. He doesn't dwell on it, and so it doesn't overwhelm the second half of the film. The slowness of the final scenes forms a balance with the first half, and they have a greater impact as a result.

Prior to this, while the acting in Griffith's shorts was becoming increasingly naturalistic, his actors still often slipped into over-the-top pantomiming when their characters' emotions ran high. Here however, in a picture that has a lot of scope for melodrama with its murder and madness, Sweet surprisingly manages to keep it relatively real. Importantly Griffith also encourages a deep performance from her by doing very long takes of her madness scenes.

The Painted Lady has aged better than most Griffith pictures, and is still very effective today mainly thanks to Blanche Sweet's acting. It goes to show that the depiction of a deranged loner unable to connect with society goes back a lot further than Travis Bickle.